During children’s everyday life and preschool they meet various visual representations that explores through their senses, they can see, feel, smell, listen or taste. Children explore and talk about the mathematics they encounter in everyday life. From our experiences, we often come across educators and adults who have not taken advantage of the children's own included representations. Instead, teachers often focus on creating their own activities which is based on the pre-school curriculum. Based on previous observations in practice, we have observed that adults and educators often take less account of the children’s interests to the visual representations that they encounter in their everyday life. This is why we have chosen to study on what, how and why educators use visual representations in mathematics. The chosen theories show that the use of visual representations has many advantages, but that there may also be disadvantages.
The results of this this empirical study consists of collection of interviews. These are analyzed and discussed with the theories. Based on the results, we realize that many educators use visual images in mathematics, both consciously but also unconsciously.